The First National Baha'i House of Worship Opens in Kinshasa

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

On 25 March 2023, the Baha'i community dedicated its first national House of Worship in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, an edifice with nine entrances surrounding a central dome inscribed with the Greatest Name, set among surrounding gardens.

More than two thousand people attended from across the country and abroad, among them government officials, traditional chiefs, religious leaders and members of the Baha'i National Spiritual Assembly of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Choirs from several regions of the country joined the ceremony, which also included a screening of a documentary on the faith's history in the country.

Reporting on the dedication situated it within the Baha'i faith's wider pattern of temple building, following the continental Mother Temple of Africa in Uganda and a local House of Worship already opened in Kenya.

What the Kinshasa dedication changed for the Baha'i community's presence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo was giving the country its own national House of Worship for the first time, placed in a sequence of African temples that already included a continental Mother Temple in Uganda and a local house in Kenya, and marked by an attendance drawing in government officials and traditional chiefs alongside the faith's own national leadership.